


Red Pearl

by MagnificentNorth



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Elizabeth's POV, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Light Angst, Ocean, Pirates, Relationship Development, Separation and Reunion, and all the accompanying emotions, seeing POC 5 got me thinking about everything they had already been through
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 16:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13368597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagnificentNorth/pseuds/MagnificentNorth
Summary: "The sea had given him to her and the sea took him back again."An exploration of Will and Elizabeth's relationship from their first meeting to their final reunion.





	Red Pearl

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fan fiction I’ve ever published. I hope you enjoy it!

The sea gave him to her, a tiny scrap of humanity floating in the wreckage. Even then – barely past boyhood, unconscious, adrift, utterly helpless – he survived as he always did. Always would.

At her cry, they pulled him from the water, put him in her charge. The waves had chewed the substance out of his clothes. Exposure to the wet and chill had left his face a portrait of shadow and bone. He awoke just long enough to choke out his name. 

“Will Turner.”

Pity – and something else that she couldn't quite place, something that was still very small – flared into single-minded fascination as soon as she saw the medallion around his neck.

They grew up, a governor’s daughter and a blacksmith’s apprentice. Then they became irrevocably entangled with pirates – though, had they ever not been? – and that feeling that had started out so small became much larger. She recognized it now.

As they cartwheeled across the high seas, he stood by her in battle like an extension of her strong sword arm. He saved her; she saved him; they saved each other a thousand times over.

He moved like the ocean, sometimes scrambling against rocky cliffs, sometimes thundering fury under a lightning storm, and sometimes a sweet, gentle tide kissing the shore. She reveled in his smile, a warm flash that lit up his face like the lance of a sunray glancing off a shield-gray sea. And he looked at her like she was a midnight moon that iced the crests of black waves with foamy frost. 

Eventually (their attempt at a more traditional ceremony having been unsuccessful) she married him on a briny, grimy, barnacled ship as the bones of the sea broke around them. Hasty, jubilant, they parried sword blows and swapped wedding vows. A kiss amidst chaos. 

Then she watched him die, the rain smearing across his face. She screamed against the heaving waves.

They tore out his heart. Locked it in a chest. 

And he gave it to her, a red pearl in a gnarled shell. 

“It’s always belonged to you. Will you keep it safe?” 

An evening beach, burnished bronze, inflamed with the last golden furies of a dying sun. They had just minutes left together, minutes with no hope of satisfying. That beach was the first time she lived, and it was the first of many times over the next twenty years that she died. The ocean dragged itself across the sand ceaselessly, relentlessly, and finally, it dragged him away too. His absence was a cold, aching, wretched thing.

The sea had given him to her and the sea took him back again.

“Keep a weather eye on the horizon.”

Every day, at sunset, she walked through wind-combed grasses and out onto the clifftops so she could see it glowing at the base of the sky. Sometimes she wept as the light receded from the world. Sometimes she smiled as the stars emerged. 

She kept the chest under her bed, hidden but just barely. At night, she lay on the edge of her mattress where she could reach down and rest her hand on the cool metal. Fainter than the sound of sand underfoot, she could sense his heart beating. It quickened at her touch.

She raised a son, a bright little boy with eyes like ocean depths. On the clifftops, she told him stories of his pirate father. 

And she always knew.

She _knew_ her son – _their_ son – hunted for him. She knew when she saw the scratches on his wall numbering the days, the months, the years; when she discovered a stash of books in ten different languages on sea myths; when she woke in the night to a sharp salty breeze and found a window ajar. Maybe she should have stopped him, should have refused the allure of a child’s hope… but she never did. She could never bring herself to subdue the ripple.

After twenty years, he came back to her - the son they had created in stolen moments of love _brought_ him back to her. He walked stiffly on land, his gait still tuned to the rhythm of the waves, but even so, he began to run.

She flew to him, sprinting across the well-worn clifftops where her steps had etched trails in the grass. The unforgiving sea winds had worn his skin into a fine leather. The crust of barnacles that had shackled his body left vague scars. Salt lodged in the corners of his eyes, residue from the ocean waters and from his own tears.

A beat, then a fierce embrace. It was like every dawn to every sunset she had ever watched broke all at once.

His voice was gruffer, lower, _rawer_ than the last time as he whispered her name into her hair. “ _Elizabeth_.”

And after all those years – those vast, empty, parched years like tide pools in the heat of midday – there was nothing to say. No words could provide release for her swelling heart, so tight and so full that she was sure it would tear through her ribcage. There was only her body against his, and then their lips together.

Deep in her sleep that night, she stirred as she felt him draw her close. His hand pressed gently on her back as he settled their bodies together, his forehead resting against hers. She smiled as she drifted off again, cradled in the warmth of his presence.

The last things she heard were the steady beats of the red pearl within him.

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack: 
> 
> Elizabeth/Will Suite by Hans Zimmer from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpzugAebEZU


End file.
